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Topics in this example
1) With a line chart, by placing Year(Order Date) on the Color shelf and Month(Date) on the columns, you can easily compare multiple years on the same pane of the graph. Just use Running Totals from the Quick Table Calculation dialog.
2) If this were real-world data, you would likely want to keep data through today; otherwise, prior years would likely be much higher since they are based on a full month while this year’s latest month is partially complete, unless it is the last day of the month!
3) By creating a calculated field that can check if the month/day is before today’s month/day and placing it on the filter shelf and selecting True, you can keep year-to-date data
Balancing analysis of multiple years by filtering through the same month/day as today
Bringing clarity out of an infographic, “Income Inequality in the US” from Mother Jones
A colleague shared this Mother Jones infographic, which attempts to explain the disparity in income between richer and poorer families in the US. The data is indeed fascinating, but quite difficult to read in their flashy infographic.
There are two major issues that hinder understanding when viewing this infographic:
1) Using areas of circles to encode the incomes is very difficult for most people to interpret. Additionally, with the difference in income being so large, it is nearly impossible to fit this on a normally sized web page. The largest group, the yellow circle, is mostly cut off in their infographic.
2) The infographic is overloaded
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Data for examples in Rapid Graphs with Tableau Software 7 book
If you are looking for how to buy the book, please follow this link. Read the rest of this entry »
There are three sample datasets used in the Tableau 7 book that are free for anyone to use, but you must be a registered user of our site to access these downloads. Registration connects us with you so we can e-mail you 2-3 times per year with course schedules, book updates and other topics of interest. You may unsubscribe from the e-mail list at anytime by visiting our home page and clicking on the unsubscribe link. Please note that we will never share this registration information with another company.
Rapid Graphs with Tableau Software 7 now available on Amazon, Kindle and Nook
Buy the Kindle version at Amazon, just $9.97! (free preview)
Buy Nook book at Barnes & Noble, just $9.97! (free preview)
Buy the print version at Amazon US, UK, Germany,
France or Spain (only in English, regardless of source country)
International shipping alternative to Amazon
Still using Tableau 6? Yes! You can buy the 6 version!
Tired of boring spreadsheets and data overload from confusing graphs? Master the art of rapid graphs with Tableau! Tableau is designed with one goal in mind, to give you the power to quickly explore and understand your data so that you can make informed decisions in a wide variety of real-world situations. After learning Tableau, you will be able to communicate your findings with audience-friendly graphs and tables.
“A picture is worth a thousand words” is a common saying that is more relevant today
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Tableau customer profile, Eystein from Norway, Banking & Insurance
Customer
Eystein from Norway
Favorite quote speaking with him
“Make it simple and fast, my IT team was cheering on Tableau after trying it and QlikView. They really hoped we would pick Tableau and I am very happy we did.”
Situation
Eystein recently took over a BI team that wanted to accelerate use of data across every area of the bank and subsidiaries. The bank and subsidiaries are heavy users of SAS Enterprise Guide, SAS Web Report Studio and SAS Enterprise Miner.
They have a variety of data sources and data marts throughout the business. There is also a centralized Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) effort that is making headway, but has a long list of items ahead of them. In the meantime, SAS users are rapidly creating new data pulls that Eystein would like to use in Tableau. He realizes that the EDW team will never be able to have all the data that is needed by the business, so SAS is a good platform to prep the data for widespread analysis in Tableau.
Status
They recently evaluated fast analytic tools from
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Top Freakalytics articles of 2011
#5 Examining data over time (7 ways with Netflix stock prices)
#4 Bullet charts & enhancements: making Stephen Few’s invention even better
Helping a state government agency – a dashboard of poverty rates in Utah
We are always excited to see new people using visual analytics with data in the public interest. After seeing some great poverty analysis work from the Utah Department of Workforce Services, we wanted to share some ideas that might provide inspiration to them.
Here is the original chart
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Business Analytics in Fortune Magazine – Pat Hanrahan, Tableau Co-founder
A nice article on Tableau and visual analytics appeared in Fortune magazine this week.
“Former Pixar engineer Pat Hanrahan has found a new calling organizing and analyzing business data, and bringing the information to life.
Mr. Incredible: Pat Hanrahan in his lab at Stanford
How many enterprise software executives can brag that they have been feted by Hollywood? At least one: Pat Hanrahan, a Stanford University professor and co-founder of Seattle-based Tableau Software, earned a Scientific and Engineering Academy Award for visual-effects technology…”
A few additional comments from Freakalytics follow.
It is indeed rare that an analysis product is both informative and addictive- Tableau has achieved this remarkable mix for regular business people, not just data geeks like me! I base this on the repeated feedback from the many people I have trained on Tableau in the past few years. Several reasons lie behind this including speed, flexibility and beauty of the results you can create in Tableau.
After reading this article a second time, I was surprised to see this did not include any links to the products listed:
Examples from Freakalytics
http://www.Freakalytics.com/examples
More examples and the free version from Tableau
http://www.TableauSoftware.com/public
While Tableau isn’t a native app on the Mac, I have seen many people using it on the Mac with Windows running in Parallels. Most Mac people in the corporate world already have Windows installed in my experience. That is not to say that it wouldn’t be great to have it native on the Mac… Also, there is a sweet iPad app for viewing dynamic content from Tableau Server hosted analyses and dashboards.
In short, Tableau has redefined what business analytics software should look like and how it should engage the person using the data or reviewing the findings. It is akin to what Yahoo and Google did for finding information- it has put the analytic process in reach of the regular business user.
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